Lawyers, Red Tape Stalled End to Illegal Jail Detentions

Despite repeated warnings that inmates were being illegally detained in Los Angeles County jails, the practice persisted for years because top elected officials deferred to lawyers and relied on mid-level staff to handle the problem.

Sheriff Lee Baca said in a recent interview that he hesitated to make reforms because county lawyers--fighting a series of lawsuits over the detentions--said they were winning the legal battle. County supervisors said they talked to the Sheriff’s Department about the issue, but contended they had no power to force another elected official to make changes.

Top leaders took decisive action only after it became clear late last year that the county was in danger of losing several class-action lawsuits alleging that inmates were routinely held past their release dates and illegally strip-searched. At that point, an alarmed Baca ordered his staff to correct the problem within 90 days.

The eight civil rights attorneys who recently settled the cases for a record $27 million credit the sheriff with introducing procedures that significantly reduced the number of delayed releases, which affected up to 400,000 inmates over five years. But the sheriff’s order for quick action raises questions as to why no one acted more forcefully years earlier--before millions in public money was risked and hundreds of thousands of people had their rights violated.

A review of the response to the jail release problem shows that the bureaucracy slowly labored on long-range reforms while the county aggressively fought the lawsuits and spent $1.15 million in legal fees defending the practices that were under attack. In the end, substantial change came only under pressure from the courts after lengthy and costly legal battles.

“My only weak excuse--which isn’t much of an excuse at all--is the legal process was in effect and there were points made to me that, ‘Hey, we’re doing all right with this case,’ ” said Baca, who took office in January 1999. “We had a bureaucracy that no one had gotten their arms around and said, ‘Enough of this.’ ”

Timothy Midgley, one of the plaintiffs’ attorneys, recalled that county lawyers fought the suits “very aggressively.”

“They used all the legal maneuvers available to them to stop the lawsuits before they went anywhere,” Midgley said.

“The legal system inside the county bureaucracy tends to insulate the people we’re trying to get to. If we could have had a clear dialogue with Baca a year ago, the problem could have been fixed a year ago.”

County supervisors also did not resolve the problem. That’s because it’s the sheriff’s responsibility to run the jails, they said.

“I don’t pawn off responsibility on other people,” Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky said. “But I am not going to take responsibility for someone else’s shirking of it.”

But supervisors are far from powerless. They control the sheriff’s budget as well as that of the attorneys who defend the department’s practices. They also can use their bully pulpit to prod the department into change.

Board members said they leaned on the Sheriff’s Department to do something, but without management control of the agency they had to let reform, and litigation, proceed at their own pace.

“In 20/20 hindsight, of course you can say we should have taken more aggressive action,” Supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke said. “But what could we have done? I can’t say it to you. You try to come up with some way to minimize the damage.”

Supervisor Mike Antonovich said the Sheriff’s Department assured the board it was solving the problem. “When the department says they’re doing that,” Antonovich said, “we have to take their word it’s getting done.”

Supervisor Gloria Molina said she became aware of the full scope of the delayed releases only this year, because the Sheriff’s Department had reported a couple of thousand--rather than hundreds of thousands--of improperly detained inmates.

“We always find out about all policies and issues with regard to law enforcement after the fact,” Molina said. “I don’t like anyone to be sued, but sometimes that’s the only way you find out about these problems.”

Supervisor Don Knabe would not comment.

Incompatible Computer Systems

Though the board may not have known the full scope, it knew the jails had chronic problems releasing inmates on time.

News of excessive detentions and the ensuing litigation appeared in The Times and in the reports of Merrick Bobb, a lawyer employed by the Board of Supervisors to monitor the Sheriff’s Department. In a report issued to supervisors in April 1997, Bobb warned that the department’s “current paper-driven system, which is nearly defenseless to clerical error, is ultimately doomed to produce overdetentions and mistaken releases.” In annual reports stretching into 2000, Bobb noted that inmates continued to be held past their release dates.

Supervisors also got reports on the sheriff’s chosen method for dealing with excessive detentions: Deputies had set up a desk by the jail where they offered exiting inmates a few hundred dollars if they agreed not to sue for their delayed release.

Burke said she believed this was an appropriate stopgap solution until the county could develop a computer system to solve the problem.

The overlong detentions had two primary causes: the county’s failure to install the computer system that connects with the one used by the courts, and the department’s decision in about 1996 to more rigorously screen departing inmates.

Because the sheriff’s computer system is not compatible with the one used by the courts, jailers rely on bags full of paper sent from judges to tell them when to release inmates. Inevitably, paperwork is lost or misinterpreted, causing delays in court-ordered releases. The county has repeatedly delayed fixing the problem: A new computer system that will connect the two networks is not scheduled to come online until 2003.

The Sheriff’s Department made matters worse about 1996, attorneys say. At the time, then-Sheriff Sherman Block was barraged with criticism for erroneously releasing prisoners before their sentences were completed. Under pressure from the Board of Supervisors and the news media, the department stepped up its screening of those being released.

No one was allowed out until all the day’s orders from court were entered into the department’s computer--a process that could take 36 hours, according to interviews and court documents. People who were found not guilty, who had had charges dropped or had served their sentences found themselves routinely held for one or two extra days in jail. During that time, like all inmates returning from court, they were strip-searched.

“We would rather have an overdetention--and pay someone for an overdetention--than put a serious criminal back on the streets,” Assistant Sheriff Dennis Dahlman said.

Dozens of Lawsuits

The board did not pick a public fight with the sheriff over the delayed releases. Supervisors focused on the computer system as the solution to the problems. In April 1997, the board ordered an interagency task force to find a system that would relieve the persistent headache, and gave the Sheriff’s Department extra money to build its part of the network.

Molina said she tried to prod the courts and Sheriff’s Department into swiftly combining their computer systems. She said she was even the lone vote against renewing the courts’ computer contract because the necessary improvements had not been made.

But with no direct oversight of the courts or the Sheriff’s Department, there was a limit to what she could do, Molina said. “They were always in the process of correcting it,” she said.

Yaroslavsky said he and his colleagues were pressuring Block to change his procedures, and he even recalled discussing it at a two-hour lunch at Langer’s Deli near MacArthur Park in 1997.

“It has been on our radar screen and it’s been something we’re concerned about,” Yaroslavsky said. “But I’m one person and there’s a whole industry of law enforcement personnel and lawyers” to deal with.

By the spring of 1997, civil rights attorneys began filing dozens of lawsuits, some on behalf of a single client and others seeking class-action status and injunctions to stop the county from holding inmates past their court-ordered release dates.

Some supervisors said they were unaware of the lawsuits until settlement talks early this year. County attorneys do not regularly brief their bosses on the board about the hundreds of suits filed against the county every year.

The first major ruling came in a class-action case filed by prominent civil rights attorney Stephen Yagman.

In November 1998, Yagman won an injunction forbidding the Sheriff’s Department from holding people ordered released by a judge while deputies checked to see if other agencies wanted them kept in jail.

Sheriff’s officials say the injunction, combined with other changes they implemented at that time, cut jail stays. Cmdr. Chuck Jackson, who in 1998 became the captain in charge of the Inmate Release Center downtown, said he directed staff to stop waiting for the last piece of paper to be entered in the computer before releasing inmates. “We were trying to figure out release process improvements,” Jackson said.

In December 1998, U.S. District Judge Mariana R. Pfaelzer dealt the county another blow. She ruled that the sheriff’s policy of strip-searching all inmates returning from court was unconstitutional because it did not differentiate between prisoners and those who had been ordered freed by a judge, but were still being detained. She reiterated the opinion in early 1999.

Yet the strip-searches continued. County lawyers say the Sheriff’s Department did not respond to the ruling quickly enough; Jackson said lawyers did not tell him to stop the strip-searches until March 2000. Between 150,000 and 200,000 people had been illegally strip-searched since 1997, county officials say.

Baca vowed to reform the jails when he took office in January 1999. Then he deferred to confident county lawyers, who won a decision in federal court preventing the plaintiffs’ attorneys from turning their suit into a class action.

“Legal processes tend to take on a life of their own,” Baca said. “Oftentimes lawyers become the managers of organizations. . . . It’s a matter of saying to myself that the lawyers are not running the Sheriff’s Department. I am.”

The county wasn’t winning for long. By the end of last October, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals had reversed the denial of class certification that had cheered county lawyers. Three judges indicated that they would certify classes in three of the lawsuits. The potential damages represented by those three cases alone could be in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

“The tsunami was forming,” plaintiffs’ lawyer Donald Cook said.

Settlement talks perked up. Baca said he got involved at the start of this year, when the negotiations called for a $60-million county payout. The sheriff said he realized the department needed dramatic change.

He gave his commanders 90 days to resolve the problem. The department began releasing inmates directly from court. It began processing releases for prisoners finishing their sentences the night before the sentence ended. Officials there say delayed releases have plummeted. Civil rights attorneys say complaints of late releases have stopped, though it’s too soon to say whether the problem has been completely solved.

“It was something I had to take drastic action to fix, and not use the court or the legal process as a cover not to fix,” Baca said.

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Times staff writer Evelyn Larrubia contributed to this report.